Emancipation

Campaigning for Freedom

With the passing of the Abolition
of the Slave Trade Act by the British Parliament in 1807,
the attention of campaigners against the slave trade switched
to slavery itself. For although the slave trade had been banned,
nothing had been done to free the existing enslaved workforce
in the British empire. In 1823 religious groups, politicians
and supporters from around the country came together to form
the Anti-Slavery Society.

Women's Anti-Slavery Associations

During the 1820s and early 1830s, a strong network of women's
anti-slavery associations developed. The Birmingham Society
played a particularly active role in helping to promote and
establish local groups in many parts of Britain. Influenced
by the Birmingham Society, over 73 women's associations were
founded between 1825 and 1833, which supplied a constant stream
of information to rouse public opinion against slavery.

In the anti-slavery movement, women found
a basis from which they could pursue their own liberation.
They were able to use the terminology of the anti-slavery
campaign as a way to articulate some of the inequalities they
suffered; and the anti-slavery campaign in many ways set the
scene for the women's rights movement.

One way in which enslaved Black women in Britain fought against
their status was by running away. One such woman was Mary
Prince, a Bermudan who escaped from her owners shortly
after her arrival in London in 1828. Although very particular
about the enslaved women it chose to support, the Abolition
Society was instrumental in the writing and publishing of
Prince's narrative The History of Mary Prince, a West
Indian Slave. Related by Herself.

This text, which was one of many used by the abolitionists
to further their campaign, was in fact the first slave narrative
by a woman from the British Caribbean. The preface to it states
that the 'idea of writing Mary Prince's history was first
suggested by herself. She wished it to be done, she said,
that good people in England might hear from a slave what a
slave had felt and suffered.'

Poignantly, Mary Prince describes her purpose in making her
experiences public, despite the painfulness of recalling and
articulating her suffering:

Oh the horrors of slavery! - How the thought of it pains
my heart! But the truth ought to be told of it; and what
my eyes have seen I think it is my duty to relate; for few
people in England know what slavery is. I have been a slave
- I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what a slave
knows; and I would have all the good people in England to
know it too, that they may break our chains, and set us
free.

The Road to Emancipation

By 1824 there were more than 200 branches of the Anti-Slavery
Society in Britain - an indicator of increasing support for
the fight against slavery. The campaign was one of many taking
place, for this was a period of great economic and social
change both in Britain and in the British colonies. It was
increasingly evident that the plantation system in the British
Caribbean was in need of reform and transformation. Factory
owners in England were being forced to consider the rights
and needs of workers; and with shifts in international borders
and trade, British planters were facing new forms of competition
in a changing world market. Moreover, deprived of their cargoes
of enslaved men and women, British ships now crossed the Atlantic
fully laden - with raw materials such as cotton and sugar
- on the return journey only. Thus, the abolition of slavery
in Britain was waged in a society already in a state of economic,
political and social flux. As C. L. R. James was to later
argue, the abolition of slavery was to be an integral part
of the development of modern British society.

Rebellion and Retaliation

While William Wilberforce, Lord Brougham and others pushed
the debate forward in Parliament, enslaved people in the
Caribbean continued to fight individually, as well as
collectively, against slavery. As the reporting of the campaign
gained momentum in the press - both in Britain and throughout
the British Caribbean - rebellions and resistance increased.
For example, in 1823 in Demerara, in British Guiana, over
13,000 slaves joined a rebellion because they felt that the
local plantation owners had refused to obey British orders
to free them.

Planters in the Caribbean and their supporters and pro-slavery
representatives in the British Parliament continued to argue
for slavery. From time to time this opposition erupted into
violence, and in some cases missionaries in the West Indies
who were in favour of emancipation found their churches burned
by aggrieved planters.

Emancipation Achieved

In the 1830s, a number of Acts were passed that fundamentally
changed British society and the lives of millions of people
living in British colonies. The Reform Act of 1832 brought
an end to the old system whereby most MPs were allowed to
buy their seats in Parliament. The new Parliament of 1833
included men (women were not as yet allowed to become MPs)
who were connected with the new textile industries based in
Britain. In August 1833, the Slave Emancipation Act was passed,
giving all slaves in the British empire their freedom, albeit
after a set period of years. Plantation owners received compensation
for the 'loss of their slaves' in the form of a government
grant set at £20,000,000. In contrast, enslaved people
received no compensation and continued to face much hardship.
They remained landless, and the wages offered on the plantations
after emancipation were extremely low.

The 1833 Act did not come into force until 1 August 1834.
The first step was the freeing of all children under six.
However, although the many thousands of enslaved people in
the British West Indies were no longer legally slaves after
1 August 1834, they were still made to work as unpaid apprentices
for their former masters. These masters continued to ill-treat
and exploit them. Enslaved people in the British Caribbean
finally gained their freedom at midnight on 31 July 1838.